Hilla Rebay: visionary baroness: a recent New York gallery exhibition provided an in-depth look at the paintings, drawings and collages of Hilla Rebay, the tireless, idiosyncratic spirit behind Solomon R. Guggenheim's formation of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, which later became the Guggenheim Museum - Critical Essay

For seven months last year, the exhibition "Brazil, Body & Soul" suffused the Guggenheim Museum in an ecclesiastical aura as polychrome Madonnas and crucifixes climbed the lower tiers of the darkened rotunda and spiraled around a gilded Baroque altar-piece rising 44 feet from the ground floor. It was odd to recall, in the midst of this extravagant spectacle, that the Guggenheim was originally conceived as a temple celebrating not religious statuary but the quasi-religion of non-objective art.

The high priestess of that temple was Hilla Rebay, a German-born aristocrat who became Solomon R. Guggenheim's friend, adviser and possibly lover, and convinced him to establish what would become the Guggenheim Museum. Rebay met Guggenheim in 1928 when he commissioned her to paint his portrait. She was 38 and fresh from 13 years on and off in Berlin. There she had imbibed the gospel of modernism from Kandinsky, Klee, Chagall and, most importantly, her lovers Hans Arp and Rudolf Bauer. Solomon Guggenheim was 66 and fair game for the charming and ambitious young avant-gardist. While working on a figurative portrait, Rebay used his sittings with her to convert him to the cause of non-objective art.

Rebay was a complicated character. Contemporary reports describe her as autocratic, eccentric, generous, charming and relentlessly dedicated to the promotion of non-objective art. She was met curial, given to savage rages and icy scorn, as well as to tremendous kindness to those in need. She was a devotee of esoteric religions and bizarre health practices, at one point persuading Guggenheim Museum architect Frank Lloyd Wright to have his wisdom teeth removed to ward off bad humors. She cared deeply for artists and persuaded Guggenheim to provide financial assistance to struggling painters while helping him amass the art which became the Museum of Non-Objective Painting and later the core of the Guggenheim Museum. After shepherding this collection through a series of temporary rented homes, Rebay was the guiding force behind Guggenheim's decision to hire Wright to create what remains one of the great museums of the world.

Today, Rebay and her passion for non-objectivity are little more than footnotes in the history of modern art. In part, she is a victim of the Francophilia which continues to pervade conventional histories of early modernism, in effect relegating German and American versions of abstraction to the status of also-rans. Rebay's marginalization may also derive from her advocacy of an airily spiritualist interpretation of modernist abstraction that has long since fallen out of fashion. (She wrote in 1937 that the works she championed "elevate into the cosmic beyond where there is no meaning, no intellect, no explanation, but something infinitely greater--the wealth of spiritual intelligence and beauty.")

But there is no question that Rebay's historical invisibility was guaranteed by a power struggle at the Guggenheim Foundation after Solomon Guggenheim's death in 1949. She was removed from the directorship of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1952 and, sub-sequently, her role was rewritten in a way that obscured her very real contribution to the public acceptance of modernism in America.

A delightfully partisan account of Rebay's rise and fall, written by her friend and contemporary, the Canadian-born non-objectivist painter Rolph Scarlett, has just been published by Midmarch Arts Press. (1) Scarlett, who died in 1984 at the age of 95, argues that Guggenheim's successors deliberately violated his last wishes out of jealousy regarding Rebay's hold over him, relegating many of the collection's most important works (including the 350 paintings by Scarlett himself) to the warehouse and rechristening the Museum of Non-Objective Painting as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Though Scarlett clearly had an axe to grind, some of his charges do have a ring of truth. Though the Kandinskys collected on Rebay's watch are frequently shown, many other works which Rebay convinced Guggenheim to buy in depth, especially those of Scarlett, Bauer and Rebay herself, have been little seen over the decades. In 1996, a massive exhibition devoted to abstraction in the 20th century included a recreation of the interior of the original Museum of Non-Objective Painting, down to the damask-covered walls and piped-in music. (2) Installed in this gallery were paintings by Scarlett, Bauer, Rebay, Kandinsky and Leger. Displayed in this way, the works of the first three artists, who appeared nowhere else in the show, took on an almost anti-quarian air; the presentation subtly distanced them from the larger history under examination.

Then, in a mini-scandal that same year, the Guggenheim deaccessioned 24 paintings, including a number by Scarlett, Bauer and Rebay, prompting charges that the museum was selling off its history. In news accounts at the time, the Guggenheim's Lisa Dennison (then curator of collections) insisted that there were still many other paintings by these artists in the collection. Nevertheless, the sale seemed to underline their minor status.